My car has miraculously come back to life, so I’ve been driving around with the old, burned CDs I made throughout high school and college.  I popped in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication late tonight and was overcome with nostalgia, manifest as chills and goosebumps.  Though it was a pretty drastic change from their earlier work, it’s going to go down as a seminal piece of American rock music, and one of their best albums ever.  This is stuff I’ll be sharing with my kids and grandkids.  Or, they’ll buy RHCP shirts at Kohl’s without knowing who the hell these guys were.  But I digress, hearing it reminded me of this awesome music video:

The song “Californication” had just about the coolest music video ever (n.b. – I was probably 10 when I first saw it).  I didn’t even like music too much at that age (all my knowledge of music came from my cousins, and that TV channel “The Box”), but the video was just really fucking cool.  First of all, it was all futuristic and computer generated – it looked like it could be a new game for the Sega Dreamcast (which was also brand new when I first heard this).  There were (apparently) rock stars, which my cousins had to inform me of later, and they played cool instruments and didn’t wear their shirts – how cool!

Anthony swam underwater and punched sharks – then he drove a sweet ass-car around the city all Crazy Taxi-style.  Flea escaped from bears and rednecks and climbed a big ass-tree.  John was too busy recovering from his heroin addiction and stuff to do anything really exciting, but he ran around LA and jumped through a giant doughnut as the city collapsed in an earthquake.  And Chad went motherfucking snowboarding – then he boarded down a goddamn bridge – how the fuck do you do that?  That’s so fucking radical.  

As a 10 year old, that video was the crux of cool.  Maybe that’s why 12 years later (boy does that make me feel old) I’m still drawn to this music and that video.  Sure it didn’t age well, but at the time it was on the cutting edge of popular music and media.  It identified an epoch of mass information, digital effects and a seismic shift in musical styles.  In a more abstract sense, these musicians became artificial, interactive, electronic avatars of themselves – a telling sign of the era that had just begun.  The video is resolved when this digital world comes apart at the seams, and these people are freed from their digital incarnations and their flesh-and-bone bodies are restored.  If only it was that easy to escape from our electronic alter-egos, and nonchalantly laugh it off with our friends.  If only…